Typically, linecards (LCs) of a network edge device may be classified within their distributed architecture into customer-facing or “access” linecards and core-facing or “core” linecards. If a virtual service instance, such as a virtual private local area network (LAN) service (VPLS) instance, having multiple remote peers is provisioned on such an edge device, then the core linecard is generally required to maintain a corresponding label for each virtual circuit (e.g., a pseudowire or “PW”) from a remote peer and a media access control (MAC) table per virtual service instance. Such an approach does not scale well with respect to the hardware resources required on core-facing linecards. For example, a network scenario with 16K virtual service instances, five peers per instance, and 128 MAC entries per virtual service instance leads to 16K*5=80K labels and 16K*128=2M MAC entries on each core linecard. The hardware resource requirements from this model thus scale poorly with respect to number of virtual service instances.